Amongthe many Massachusetts intellectuals who wrote to support the patriot
cause before and during the American Revolution, Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814)was
the only woman. [1] She was especially acclaimed in her day for two political plays, The
Adulateur (I773) and The Group (1775). Published but apparently not
performed, these satires excoriated the Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson and his
administration as greedy unprincipled sycophants. Two historical tragedies in blank verse,
The Ladies of Castile and The Sack of Rome, appeared in a 1790 volume titled
Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous. Both these plays featured republics undermined
from within by loss of civic virtue; the theme implies an authorial hope of influencing
national politics. And Warren's major work, a three-volume history of the American
Revolution running to more than twelve hundred pages, elevated the revolutionary leaders
as paragons of republican virtue to be revered and imitated.

This work, called The History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American
Revolution, Interspersed with Biographical, Political and Moral Observations, had been
composed mostly during the I78os, and only its conclusion was left to be written by
1791. [2]
Whatever the reasons for the publication delay, when the History finally came out
it was unable to hold its own against John Marshall's newly published Life of
Washington and David Ramsay's highly readable History of the American Revolution (1789),
which had been accepted as the standard account as soon as it appeared. Warren chose to
attribute the poor reception of her History to what she deemed its pronounced
antifederalism, since its place of publication--Boston--remained a Federalist stronghold
throughout Jefferson's administration and after.

After Warren's death her name continued to figure in accounts of the revolutionary era
as that of an extraordinary woman; the political content and polemical style of her
writings, however, excluded them from any American literary canon whose content was
supposed to be transcendent and whose style was supposed to be aesthetic. From the
standpoint of a renewed interest in the ideological determinants of history, however,
Warren's History becomes a good subject for scholarly inquiry. It has recently been
analyzed for its articulation of republican ideology and rhetoric, its mix of
historiographical practices (Enlightenment, providential, and exemplary), and its
participation in the construction of a national identity as a foundation for
patriotism. [3]

Stimulated by the feminist movement in academia, a few students of women's history and
writing have also returned to Warren's life and work. They have done so in the expectation
that Warren's work would overtly connect patriot ideas of liberty to the emancipation of
women, and they hoped to find protofeminist sentiments in her texts. In the main, Warren
has disappointed them; there is not much material to work with, and what there is seems to
express a gender conservatism that they find distressingly at odds with Warren's own
behavior.

Those few of her letters commenting on the status of women endorse a strong version of
the "separate spheres" doctrine in which women are restricted to domestic space
and subordinated to men. Scholars agree that The Ladies of Castile features women
characters who exhibit the freedom Warren assumed publicly to expound and advocate
republican principles; but like Warren herself, these characters do not apply republican
theory to women. As for women in the History, analysts have found only a few
passages wherein Warren refers to herself as a woman historian, and they interpret the
tone of these passages as either apologetic or coy. Some critics put the best face on
their findings by proposing that Warren sacrificed her gender interests to the goals of
nation building. Others try to save her from the charge of hypocrisy by suggesting that
she was a canny, duplicitous practitioner of conventional gender politics. [4]

In my view, while the surface and structure of Warren's History are strongly
gender-inflected, the work does not show Warren to be a progressive thinker where gender
is concerned. The historical narrative is neither a brief for women's emancipation nor a
double-voiced, duplicitous women's text. Rather, in its gendered aspect it reinforces, is
even inspirited by just that "conservative" view of women's separate sphere
articulated in her letters. In a melodramatic combination of sentimentalism and
sensationalism, Warren epitomizes the moral difference between the two sides in the war
through pathetic, brutal, and eroticized representations of attacks on American women by
the English and their mercenary allies.

The converse of this argument, however, is that whatever we may perceive as the
disparity between her profession and her practice, for Warren there is no contradiction
between the representation of gender in the text and the woman's act of authoring that
text. The gendered references to herself as author propose that history-writing as she
practices it comports fully with a traditional definition of women's sphere.
[5] She all but
says that her sympathetic recognition of women's particular vulnerability during the
Revolution has significantly shaped her account and made it a better history than other
accounts. She even hints that exclusion from the men's world of action may well be to her
advantage as a historian, since philosophically informed history--the s crucial to its
paranoid and melodramatic style.

Warren's preamble to the History has been read as a pseudo-apology for her
gender effrontery or a hypocritical ploy to secure the role of historian for herself by
implicitly agreeing that it is not appropriate for other women. I propose to read it
rather as an assertion that the rights to formulate and express political views as well as
to compose history are thoroughly compatible with the female domestic realm. Warren claims
the activities of political thinking and history-writing on behalf of all women by
connecting politics and history to women's specifically domestic interests:

The solemnity that covered every countenance, when contemplating the sword uplifted,
and the horrors of civil war rushing to habitations not inured to scenes of rapine and
misery; even to the quiet cottage, where only concord and affection had reigned;
stimulated to observation a mind that had not yielded to the assertion, that all political
attentions lay out of the road of female life. [6]

It is true there are certain appropriate duties assigned to each sex; and doubtless it
is the more peculiar province of masculine strength, not only to repel the bold invader of
the rights of his country and of mankind, but in the nervous style of manly eloquence, to
describe the blood-stainedard In the first paragraph Warren says that she had always
believed that some forms of political behavior, though presumably not all, were
appropriate for women. From the perspective of this belief, in which gender plays an
important part, she was stimulated to observation not by the spectacle of regular military
operations but by "civil war," a phrase which I do not think denotes internecine
conflict (the internecine dimension of the Revolution is muted throughout Warren's
account) but rather a mode of warfare that methodically attacks civilians and domestic
life. This is the kind of warfare that reaches into "habitations not inured to scenes
of rapine and misery; even to the quiet cottage, where only concord and affection had
reigned."

If the Revolution had been fought exclusively on the battlefield it might have remained
beyond women's scope. But since it came home from the start to women, they were virtually
obliged to think and speak out about it. Womanly thinking, as Warren exemplifies it,
cannot lead to pacifism. The war took its shape from those monsters of moral evil the
English, who also started it. Philosophical reflection about the interrelation between
morality and political ideology leads to the conclusion that the English could not have
fought in any other way, since they were monarchists. Therefore, American women could not
do otherwise than support the patriots against the English.

In the second paragraph of the extract, Warren grants that no history of a war can
avoid describing formal battles, and concedes that women are not likely to do this well.
Nevertheless the attempt must be made, because women's domestic felicity depends on
"the unimpaired possession of civil and religious liberty." Therefore, though
her female heart "trembled" and her hand "shrunk" at the challenge of
the task of describing the battlefield, "the work was not relinquished." Thus
Warren's writing of history becomes a display of female heroism in which her strong mind
triumphs over her weak body. Rather than muting Warren's gender, this passage exposes and
defines it according to an Enlightenment ideal of universal reason. A woman's body is of
course weaker than a man's, she holds; her mind is not.

I read this preface, then, as a site where Warren, balancing the shortcomings and
strengths that she brings as a woman to the task of writing history, concludes that the
strengths predominate. Elsewhere in the preface she refers to her personal connections
with many important patriots, thus invoking a filiopietism that is also compatible with
her gender. Her woman's vantage point does not produce radical
counterhistory, however,
because it depends precisely on its location within and valorization of the already
prescribed women's sphere. If women are justified in assuming the historians' role by
their overriding interest in and responsibility for the domestic realm, it follows that
they must write a kind of history that reinforces the value of domesticity. The narrative
shows (so do her historical plays) that the values of domesticity and republicanism are
inextricably connected. When Warren's History is approached from this
perspective--that is, as validating women's political activism in certain forms and on
behalf of the domestic sphere--the controlling presence of gender becomes much more
evident in its pages. [7]

My argument at this point demands brief reconsideration of the claim that Warren
suppressed references to gender because she was interested in creating a patriotic
consensus. I am already launched on the argument that she did not suppress gender
references, and I would add that the History does not seem to me a conciliatory and
consensus-building document. The lone contemporary review of the History observed that it
was not a "prudent" work. [8] Indeed, it seems to me that Warren relates gender to
politics as a means of dismissing any consensus that deviates from strict republican
principles; gender representation becomes a tool to prevent compromise, not encourage it.
She has no interest in transcending party sentiment if one party is republican and the
other is not.

Those who find Warren's rhetoric suprapartisan point to three aspects of the History:
it praises the Constitution (which she had opposed earlier); it refrains from
attacking Federalist politicians by name and criticizes them with relative restraint; and
it approaches events from an ethical standpoint that inevitably subordinates political to
moral questions. Granting that these arguments describe Warren's practice fairly, it does
not follow that the History is a brief for consensus. In the 1790s, when the History
was completed, adoption of the Constitution was no longer a live issue; the likely
readers of Warren's History did not need to have the Federalists named, and would
recognize the word monarchist (her most frequently used term for them) as an implicitly
hostile representation of their opinions; and having called the Federalists monarchists,
defined monarchism as a form of avarice (lust for title, privilege, power), and attributed
virtue only to antimonarchists, she had virtually called the Federalists
vicious. [9]

Moreover, if we keep in mind the dates of the History's completion (ca. 1791) and
publication (1805), we may recall that the chief issue of foreign policy dividing
Federalists and Republicans in those two decades was whether to ally with Britain against
France, or with France against Britain. In this context, the method of representing the
English and the French in the American Revolution would necessarily have partisan
implications. Of course no revolutionary history written by an American could ignore the
facts that the English were the enemy and France an ally. But from first to last Warren's
English are demons, described, or "staged" in Lester Cohen's word, in so extreme
and inflammatory a rhetoric that one would imagine the Revolution still to be in progress.
And it is this rhetoric, this totalization of the English as monolithically vicious, that
justifies seeing Warren's history as melodrama." [10]

Opening the book to the first chapter, one reads almost at once that the New England
colonists "fled" to North America because they were "oppressed in Britain
by despotic kings, and persecuted by prelatic fury"; of the Stuarts one reads that
"the tyranny of the Stuart race has long been proverbial in English story."
[11] A
long paragraph in chapter 2 informs us that the British administration in America
consisted of "prostitutes of power," also described as "swarms of
hirelings, sent from Great Britain to ravish from the colonies the rights they claimed
both by nature and by compact." The provincial judges were "hard-hearted";
the revenue officers, with "peculation" as their only object, were open to
"every species of bribery and corruption" and operated with unchecked
"rapacity." All of them--rulers, judges, revenue officers--"were total
strangers to all ideas of equity, freedom, or urbanity." [12] Theatrical rhetoric at
this pitch characterizes Warren's handling of the English throughout--they are,
compositely, the villain of melodrama.

The melodrama's hero is constructed by Warren through her characterizations of American
patriot leaders. "The people" or their representatives are not heroic;
notwithstanding her supposed postwar adherence to the Democratic-Republican party, Warren
is no democrat. She frequently contrasts the excitable and turbulent multitude to the
enlightened and prudent few so as to distinguish the well-born heroes from the mob, as in
the following example:

As soon as this intelligence was transmitted to America, an universal murmur succeeded;
and while the judicious and penetrating thought it time to make a resolute stand against
the encroachments of power, the resentments of the lower classes broke out into such
excesses of riot and tumult, as prevented the operation of the favorite project."
[13]

The virtue of the American multitude, which emerges slowly in response to ever-more
provocation by the British, consists in a deferential willingness to be guided by virtuous
leaders. These leaders are limned and hymned as individuals from elite backgrounds who
combine remarkable talents with extraordinary virtue. Her brother James Otis is one of
them:

This gentleman, whose birth and education was [sic] equal to any in the province,
possessed an easy fortune, independent principles, a comprehensive genius, strong mind,
retentive memory, and great penetration. To these endowments may be added that extensive
professional knowledge, which at once forms the character of the complete civilian and the
able statesman.

In his public speeches, the sire of eloquence, the acumen of argument, and the lively
sallies of wit, at once warmed the bosom of the stoic and commanded the admiration of his
enemies. To his probity and generosity in the public walks were added the charms of
affability and improving converse in private life. His humanity was conspicuous, his
sincerity acknowledged, his integrity unimpeached, his honor unblemished, and his
patriotism marked with the disinterestedness of the Spartan. [14]

Similar encomiums are scattered through the History, attached especially to
those New England patriots who represent the flowering of republican virtue. Four settler
types are distinguished and morally differentiated: liberty lovers in New England, comfort
lovers in the middle colonies, status lovers in the South, and riot lovers on the borders.
Because the New England character alone is admirable, Warren gives little praise to
leaders from other regions. She even treats George Washington coolly (notwithstanding that
she had dedicated her 1790 Poems to him), attributing many of his victories to
Providence, many of his defeats to temperamental apathy. And she is outraged at his
support for the Order of Cincinnatus, the military meritocratic association which she
blasts for insinuating crypto-monarchial principles into the fabric of the new nation.

The villain and hero of melodrama are brought into narrative relation through the
intervention of a third term, the helpless victim who is threatened by the villain,
defended and (we hope) rescued by the hero. It could be theorized that this third term
will be gendered feminine in every case by the overdetermined structure of melodramatic
narrative; those who fight are male, those who are fought over are female. Accordingly,
the threatened ideal Liberty, who must be rescued from threatened violation by Monarchism
and safely installed in a Republic--was typically represented as a woman in revolutionary
propaganda." [15] But in Warren's narrative, the third term is also exemplified in real
women who were historically at risk. Driven from their homes and abused by the English
military, they were protected and finally restored to their rightful domain by the
American patriot. Very quickly in the History the real and the ideal coalesce; the
threat to American liberties becomes one with the threat to women and is enacted literally
in rapes and murders.

This thematics, if common in revolutionary America, is particularly striking in
Warren's narrative, as one may see by comparing it to other histories. For an example, I
compare relevant parts of Ramsay's treatment of the Battle of Lexington to hers. Note in
the extract from Ramsay: the matter-of-fact tone of reportage, the focus on patriot
fighting tactics, and the assessment of the event's significance in terms of its effect on
the English army.

The King's troops having done their business, began their retreat towards Boston. This
was conducted with expedition, for the adjacent inhabitants had assembled in arms, and
began to attack them in every direction. In their return to Lexington they were
exceedingly annoyed, both by those who pressed on their rear, and others, who pouring in
on all sides, fired from behind stone walls, and such like coverts, which supplied the
place of lines and redoubts. At Lexington the regulars were joined by a detachment of 900
men, under Lord Percy, which had been sent out by General Gage to support
Lieutenant-colonel Smith. This reinforcement having two pieces of cannon awed the
provincials, and kept them at a greater distance, but they continued a constant, though
irregular and scattering fire, which did great execution. The close firing from behind the
walls by good marksmen, put the regular troops in no small confusion, but they
nevertheless kept up a brisk retreating fire on the militia and minute men. A little after
sunset the regulars reached Bunker's Hill, worn down with excessive fatigue, having
marched that day between thirty and forty miles. On the next day they crossed Charlestown
ferry, and returned to Boston." [16]

Warren's account of the same segment of the action virtually ignores the achievement of
the American soldiery; one would not even know that they were deemed to have
"won" the engagement. It demonizes the British commanding officer and
concentrates on British atrocities that Ramsay does not mention:

The adjacent villagers collected, and prepared to cut off their retreat; but a dispatch
had been sent by colonel Smith to inform general Gage, that the country was arming, and
his troops in danger. A battalion under the command of lord Percy was sent to succour him,
and arrived in time to save Smith's corps. A son of the duke of Northumberland, previous
to this day's work, was viewed by Americans with a favorable eye; though more from a
partiality to the father, than from any remarkable personal qualities discoverable in the
son. Lord Percy came up with the routed corps near the fields of Menotomy; where
barbarities were committed by the king's armies, which might have been expected only from
a tribe of savages. They entered, rifled, plundered, and burnt several houses; and in some
instances, the aged and infirm fell under the sword of the ruffian; women, with their
new-born infants, were obliged to fly naked, to escape the fury of the flames in which
their houses were enwrapped. [17]

The striking differences are attributable in part but by no means entirely to different
source materials. (Of course the choice of source materials involves authorial decision as
well.) Ramsay is known to have depended on the English Annual Register much more
than Warren, a source not likely to dwell on atrocities committed by English soldiers.
Warren's sources have not been studied, but she obviously depended on the Narrative of
the Excursion and Ravages of the Kinq's Troops under the Command of General Gaqe, on the
Nineteenth of April 1775 compiled and published by order of the Provincial Congress
soon after the battle. This document accuses the British of the "plundering and
burning of dwelling-houses and other buildings, driving into the street women in
child-bed, killing old men in their houses unarmed." It appends to its brief
narrative summary some two dozen affidavits supporting particulars of the narrative. One
of these, by Benjamin and Rachel Cooper, describes the murders of "two aged
gentlemen" and another by Hannah Adams, wife of Deacon Joseph Adams, tells how three
soldiers

broke into the room in which I then was, laid on my bed, being scarcely able to walk
from my bed to the fire, not having been to my chamber door from my being delivered in
child-birth to that time. One of said soldiers immediately opened my curtain with his
bayonet fixed, pointing the same to my breast. I immediately cried out for the Lord's sake
do not kill me, he replied, damn you, one that stood near said, we will not hurt the
woman, if she will go out of the house, but we will surely burn it. I immediately arose,
threw a blanket over me, went out, and crauled [sic] into a corn-house near the door, with
my infant in my arms, where I remained until they were gone, they immediately set the
house on fire, in which I had left five children and no other person, but the fire was
happily extinguished, when the house was in the utmost danger of being consumed."
[18]

Although the depositions repeatedly describe the English looting and burning of houses,
these are the only depositions citing attacks on civilians, and also the only ones given
by women." [19] Warren's enumeration of "barbarities" committed under Percy's
command and presumably with his consent may be seen as a literal replication of her
source, but I would suggest that it is an attempt to present a record that reflects
women's experiences of and perspectives on events. Neither Warren nor Ramsay give an
account that is absolutely true (even assuming that such an account could be given); each
selects from the available material according to a gendered sense of priorities. Ramsay
writes about military strategy and the winning of battles, Warren about atrocities
perpetrated on civilians and the destroying of homes.

To further her theme, Warren melodramatizes her source by multiplying the number of
women victims and arranging events so that they culminate in an eroticized scene where
naked women with newborn babies are driven from their homes. Hannah Adams testified that
she covered herself with a blanket before ducking out of the door into a nearby
corn-house. Warren's unhoused women are also uncovered. This exaggeration identifies women
with their sexualized, eroticized bodies as the source did not, and insinuates that it is
these female bodies that make it inappropriate for women to appear (to be seen) in public.
Home is the envelope that protects the bodies of these women and hence allows the women to
exist, paradoxically, as something more or other than their bodies.

The uncovered woman in the open air is an erotic spectacle; the reader is forced-with
all the connotations that the word conveys--to envision a scene in which unclad young
women are in effect assaulted by an English peer through the permitted actions of his
army. Warren's exaggeration becomes a rhetorical means of bringing out the truth about the
English. By gendering their victims as women, she makes the Revolution itself a gendered
event. And throughout the History Warren brings women into the record of the
American Revolution and makes the American Revolution into women's record by introducing
similarly gendered spectacles:

Every favorable impression was erased, and every idea of submission annihilated, by the
indiscriminate ravages of the Hessian and British soldiery in their route through the
Jersies. The elegant houses of some of their own most devoted partisans were burnt: their
wives and daughters pursued and ravished in the woods to which they had fled for shelter.
Many unfortunate fathers, in the stupor of grief, beheld the misery of their female
connexions, without being able to relieve them, and heard the shrieks of infant innocence,
subjected to the brutal lust of British grenadiers." [20]

This spectacle of female brutalization, according to Warren, was in historical fact the
agency for opening the eyes of the whole citizenry to the truth about the English that New
England leaders had recognized from the start and that her melodramatic restaging of
events is recreating.

Another factually gratuitous yet rhetorically functional detail in Warren's account of
the Battle of Lexington is its linking of the English and the Indians: "Barbarities
were committed by the king's armies, which might have been expected only from a tribe of
savages." Her source may have suggested the passage: "Such scenes of desolation
would be a reproach to the perpetrators, even if comitted by the most barbarous nations,
how much more when done by Britons famed for humanity and tenderness."
[21] But Warren
substitutes a tribe of savages for a barbarous nation, and hence specifies Indians; and
she does not say that these events would be a reproach to the Indians. Just the contrary:
she says it would be expected of them. Warren's dehumanizing tactic is clear. She
regularly offers the English-Indian alliance along with Indian attacks on women and
domesticity as evidence of English inhumanity, taking the inhumanity of the Indians
for granted.

Ramsay, meditating on the alliance of the English with Indians, writes that "as
terror was one of the engines by which Great Britain intended to enforce the submission of
the Colonies, nothing could be more conducive to the excitement of this passion, than the
cooperation of the Indians. Policy, not cruelty, led to the adoption of this
expedient." [22] Warren explains this alliance in precisely the melodramatic terms that
Ramsay rejects, taking the English deployment of the cruel Indians as evidence of their
own cruelty.

Ramsay's and Warren's comparative treatment of the murder of Jane
McCrea is especially noteworthy here. This killing, said to have taken place on 27 July
1777, was a notorious incident in the early part of the war and circulated in countless
versions. I have found it recounted in American history textbooks in use after the Civil
War. The presently accepted account is that McCrea, on her way to Fort Edward to meet her
Loyalist fiance who was an officer in Burgoyne's army, was taken captive by a party of
Indians from Burgoyne's advance guard. The Indians quarreled among themselves, shot and
scalped McCrea, and took the scalp to Fort Edward where her fiance recognized it. Burgoyne
intended to execute the murderer, but was persuaded not to do so by the argument of one of
his officers that all the Indians would desert if he did." [23]

Ramsay explains that the event was used by patriot leaders "to inflame the
populace, and to blacken the royal cause. The cruelties of the Indians, and the cause in
which they were engaged, were associated together, and presented in one view to the
alarmed inhabitants. Those whose interest it was to draw the militia in support of
American independence, strongly expressed their execrations of the army which submitted to
accept of Indian aid." [24] Ramsay describes Jane McCrea as a "young lady, in the
innocence of youth, and the bloom of beauty"; he writes of the killing that "she
was on the very day of her intended nuptials, massacred by the savage auxiliaries attached
to the British army" and adds circumstantial detail in a footnote beginning
"this, though true, was no premeditated barbarity." [25] Especially in the
footnote, he presents himself as a reliable narrator who can be trusted to find and
extract the core of truth from a piece of propaganda. While readily acknowledging the
inherent pathos of the event, he subordinates this real pathos to the event's aptness for
pathetic representation, and demonstrates his ability to resist its pathetic appeal. The
event is only significant because it was made significant by patriot propaganda. (Indeed,
to the extent that McCrea is written about in twentieth-century histories of the
Revolution, this is still the significance that is attached to it.)

Warren's account would be, from Ramsay's perspective, an example of patriot propaganda.
From Warren's point of view, however, her rhetoric simply highlights the true significance
of the event, which is the fate of the woman and her domestic prospects.

This beautiful young lady, dressed in her bridal habiliments, in order to be married
the same evening to an officer of character in Burgoyne's own regiment, while her heart
glowed in expectation of a speedy union with the beloved object of her affections, was
induced to leave a house near fort Edward, with the idea of being escorted to the present
residence of her intended husband, and was massacred on the way, in all the cold-blooded
ferocity of savage manners.... The best coloring that could be given the affecting tale
was, that two of the principal warriors, under a pretence of guarding her person, had in a
mad quarrel between themselves, which was best entitled to the prize, or to the honor of
the escort, made the blooming beauty, shivering in the distress of innocence, youth, and
despair, the victim of their fury. The helpless maid was butchered and scalped, and her
bleeding corpse left in the woods, to excite the tear of every beholder. [26]

For an anonymous bleeding corpse abandoned in the woods to excite the tears of many beholders,
that corpse needs to be put on display and given a pathetic history, which is what Warren
does for it. As the blooming beauty in the fullness of her prenuptial
expectations--expectations both domestic and sexual-is transformed into the grisly
spectacle of a butchered, bleeding, scalped corpse, it is precisely the sado-erotic
additions to the scene that excite the beholders' tears. Warren then links Indian fury to
the English military command by dwelling on General Burgoyne's pardon of the guilty
Indian, thereby making the British into savages. And this is not allegory: the British,
the Indians, and the murdered woman stand exactly for themselves, and it is this
self-identity of the representation and its meaning that gives the melodrama its
monolithic force and its homogeneous simplicity.

With few exceptions, Warren presents Indians as demons, associating them with animals
and the wilderness in a conventional image that invokes a long tradition of captivity
narratives and signifies the farthest extreme from domesticity. There are no Indian women
in the History, and an early passage reflecting on Indian claims to land on the
basis of prior ownership appears to assess the Indian wish to keep land and the English
wish to acquire it as equally avaricious." [27] One exceptional passage, occurring near
the end of the text in a section about the peace treaty, is worth particular consideration
because it appears to introduce a more sympathetic view of Indians." [28]

The American claims to a vast uncultivated tract of wilderness, which neither Great
Britain, France, or America, had any right to invade, may ultimately prove a most
unfortunate circumstance to the Atlantic states, unless the primary objects of the
American government should be, to civilize and soften the habits of savage life. But if
the lust of domination, which takes hold of the ambitious and the powerful in all ages and
nations, should be indulged by the authority of the United States, and those simple tribes
of men, contented with the gifts of nature, that had filled their forests with game
sufficient for their subsistence, should be invaded, it will probably be a source of most
cruel warfare and bloodshed, until the extermination of the original possessors. In such a
result, the mountains and the plains will perhaps be filled with a fierce, independent
race of European and American emigrants, too hostile to the borderers on the seas to
submit willingly to their laws and government, and perhaps too distant, numerous, and
powerful, to subdue by arms." [29]

Without denying that in this extract Warren's savage demons have suddenly become simple
men contented with nature's gifts, I attribute this rhetorical shift to her focus here on
American territorial expansion, which she profoundly opposed. The historical record, as
presented, for example, in her own blank verse historical tragedies, linked territorial
expansion to empire and the death of republics. Any republic that embarks on a program of
territorial expansion must evolve into an empire and thereby destroy itself as a republic;
the empire then goes on to destroy those republics whose territory it occupies. In the
specific historical instance of the United States, a vast territory peopled by
temperamentally unruly men would be ungovernable and the central government would have to
change its political form. Thus Warren preferred Indians (especially Indians free of
English influence) outside the national borders to ruffians within them. She shows no
interest in preserving the Indians and their ways of life either as a matter of moral
principle or for the Indians' own sake. And she discloses no sign of a feeling that women
and Indians shared common ground in their subjugation to a Eurocentric patriarchy.

Nor, it may be added, is she any more proleptically enlightened about American blacks.
She writes, absolutely without irony, that Lord Dunsmore, the Royal Governor of Virginia,
"had the inhumanity early to intimate his designs if opposition ran high, to declare
freedom to the blacks, and on any appearance of hostile resistance to the king's
authority, to arm them against their masters." [30]

Warren did not make the possible connection between her own situation and that of
Indians and blacks for several reasons. Her way of abstracting the category
"Woman" from the human field involves a biological and physiological specificity
that keeps her from combining it with any other category. Whether or not the physiological
facts of women's existence would be properly called "oppressive" in her view,
she would not hold men responsible for them. God is responsible; and since God is good,
women's tasks are to accept their situation and support those men who do not take
advantage of their weakness. The fact that it is only men of republican principle who
support domesticity and therefore honor women is a virtual proof that republicanism is the
divinely sanctioned form of government.

Not the least interesting aspect of Warren's gendering of her History, then, is
its demonstration of republican attitudes toward women through vignettes wherein women
attached to the English side appeal successfully to the domestic principles of republican
heroes. The English Major Ackland is mentioned twice by name in Ramsay: "Major
Ackland, at the head of the British grenadiers, sustained [the American attack] with great
firmness"; "Majors Williams and Ackland were taken, and the latter
wounded." [31] Warren, citing Burgoyne's memoirs as her source, gives two pages and an
appendix, not to Ackland, but to his wife Lady Ackland, who left the English camp,
traveled through the wilderness to the American lines "through a dark and cold night,
far advanced in a state that always requires peculiar tenderness to the sex," and was
required by the sentry to wait until morning to be announced to General Gates. "With
a heart full of anxiety for her wounded husband, she was obliged to submit, and in this
perilous situation, to reflect until the dawn of the morning, on her own wretched
condition, and the uncertainty of what reception she should meet from strangers in hostile
array, flushed with victory, and eager to complete the triumph of the preceding day."
But never fear; these strangers in hostile array are Americans. "When general
Gates in the morning was made acquainted with the situation and request of lady
Ackland,
she was immediately permitted to visit her husband, under a safe escort. The American
commander himself treated her with the tenderness of a parent, and gave orders that every
attention should be paid due to her rank, her sex, her character, and the delicacy of her
person and circumstances." [32]

A second example: an English prisoner, Captain Asgill, was condemned to death by lot
because the English refused to hand over the murderers of an American named
Huddy. The
prudent Ramsay writes that "General Washington received a letter from the Count de
Vergennes, interceding for Capt. Asgill, which was also accompanied with a very pathetic
one from his mother, Mrs. Asgill, to the Count. Copies of these several letters were
forwarded to Congress, and soon after they resolved, 'that the commander in chief be
directed to set Capt. Asgill at liberty'. The lover of humanity rejoiced that the
necessity for retaliation was superseded, by the known humanity of the new commander in
chief, and still more by the well-founded prospect of a speedy peace."
[33]

In Warren's handling of this episode, the mother, Lady Asgill, and her pathetic letter
take center stage. If Warren's fondness for the titled Lady Ackland and Lady Asgill
comports poorly with her republicanism, it is supported by a gender system that makes
women vulnerable and valuable in proportion to their refinement, both physical and mental.
Captain Asgill

remained a prisoner under the sentence of death, although execution was delayed, until
every compassionate heart was relieved by the interference of maternal tenderness. The
address of Lady Asgill his mother, whose heart was wrung with agonizing fears for the fate
of an only son, procured his release.

After the first pangs of grief and agitation, on the news of his critical and hazardous
situation, had subsided, she wrote in the most pathetic terms to the count de Vergennes;
urging that his influence with general Washington and the American congress might be
exerted, to save an innocent and virtuous youth from an ignominious death, and restore the
destined victim to the bosom of his mother. This letter, fraught with sentiments that
discovered a delicate mind, an improved understanding, and a sensibility of heart, under
the diction of polished style, and replete with strong epithets of affection, the French
minister shewed to the king and queen of France, as a piece of elegant composition....

The king of France and his royal partner were touched by the distress of this unhappy
mother, and lent their interest for the liberation of her son. The count de Vergennes was
directed to send the letter to general Washington; which he did, accompanied with the
observations of the king and queen, and combined with his own request in favor of young
Asgill." [34]

In both of these pathos-creating vignettes, the women are not passive or vacuous; they
display initiative and courage, but do so within limits clearly circumscribed by their
gender and in such a way as to call attention to themselves as women.

In sum, gender is an essential constituent in the plot of Warren's History which,
in its stark contrasts of virtue and vice, of power and powerlessness, falls well within
the generic shape of melodrama. A particularly compelling example of how Warren drags
young women into the action to make her narrative erotic and melodramatic occurs in the
second of two long interpolations about British tyranny in India. During an English
assault on Annapaur, "the [Indian] women, unwilling to be separated from their
relations, or exposed to the brutal licentiousness of the soldiery, threw themselves in
multitudes into the moats with which the fort was surrounded. Four hundred beautiful young
women, pierced with the bayonet, and expiring in each other's arms, were in this situation
treated by the British with every kind of outrage." [35] What does this incident have to
do with the American Revolution? In a literal sense, nothing; in terms of the meaning of
the American Revolution for women, everything.

From one point of view, the gendering that I have tried to establish in Warren's History
has no necessary connection with the gender of its author. Gendered melodramas of
rapine and pillage, while obviously claiming to be devoted to women's interests, are
common to patriot propaganda in wartime throughout history; they do not imply a woman's
signature. But it is Warren herself who associates her History with her gender. She
asks the reader to keep in mind that a woman has written this particular history and to
identify her storytelling mode as female. From her point of view, then, the violated,
powerless women's bodies in the historical story pose no contradiction to the stance taken
by the powerful woman's voice in which the story is told. This is because to Warren mind
and body are not one entity: a woman's mind is not shaped or controlled by its material
container.

In the first of the two passages on India, Warren, as though recognizing how far afield
from its subject her discourse seems to have wandered, comments that

observations on the moral conduct of man, on religious opinion or persecutions, and the
motives by which mankind are actuated in their various pursuits, will not be censured when
occasionally introduced. They are more congenial to the taste, inclination, and sex of the
writer, than a detail of the rough and terrific scenes of war. Nor will a serious or
philosophic mind be displeased with such an interlude, which may serve as a temporary
resting-post to the weary traveller, who has trodden over the field of carnage, until the
soul is sickened by a view of the absurdity and cruelty of his own species."
[36]

Warren seems to say that the narration is gendered at the discursive level by the
authorial refusal to rest content with mere facts, by her evinced desire to go beyond
simple notation of event through reflective and judgmental commentary. An untheorized
linear narration of facts might be appropriate for a man, so to speak, but not for the
woman historian. Warren seems to be claiming that her narration is gender-marked by an
intellectual seriousness that leads her to move from the scene of carnage to a commentary
on the scene's meaning, from narrative to didacticism. Woman, then, is in her essence
mind, as man is essentially body.

Melodrama, of course, is a didactic genre par excellence. And while it may seem almost
perverse from our post-structuralist moment to attempt to square this mentalized
representation of the woman historian with the exposed and eroticized woman's body that
has dominated her factual account, this incompatibility may be taken as the very point. To
Warren, woman's domain obviously cannot be the material world of action; in that world she
is destined to be wholly identified with her vulnerable body. If she could be sequestered
from that world in some protected space, however, woman might become what she inherently
is: a mind. And in that space, from that space, her mind can contribute to the polity.
While men are busy doing in the world, women may be busy thinking about the world. Men in
their highest development are statesmen and generals, women in their highest development
are philosophers and teachers.

We may see here an early trace of that strategic move by which nineteenth-century
Protestant American women constructed themselves as guardians of morality and tradition,
as educators of the young, as ethical inspirers of their husbands and brothers and, in
this roundabout way, gave themselves a role to play in the public world that they could
not enter "in person." Warren's two ways of gendering women--as powerless public
bodies and as powerful private minds--can be seen as compatible with each other and with a
doctrine of separate spheres in which the material, physical, and biological differences
between men and women put women at a truly fatal disadvantage when they are forced into
the man's world . [37]

To the extent that Warren believed that the republican form of government was the only
political system that valued women, her view of sexual difference and her commitment to
enunciating republican principles converged and reinforced each other. The idea that women
had no stake in politics and government was, from her perspective, absurd. Their lives
depended on the kind of government they lived under. Women fortunate enough to live in a
republic had every obligation to serve it as best they could. If the republic were to
decline from its original principles, women had a patriotic obligation to attempt to
reverse the trend. And it seems fair to say that Warren would agree that if the republic
were overthrown, women would have a moral obligation to join the opposition. Although
these beliefs do not seem to challenge the sexual politics of everyday life, they
underwrote Warren's vociferous contributions to the public sphere not as a unique
individual, but as a generic woman.

Notes:

1 There is no up-to-date biography of Warren; the best biographical source, is Maud
Macdonald Hutcheson, "Mercy Warren, 1728-1814," William and Mary
Quarterly 10 (1953):378-402.

2 Mercy Otis Warren, The History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the
American Revolution, Interspersed with Biographical, Political and Moral Observations, ed.
Lester H. Cohen (Indianapolis, 1989).

3 For discussion of Warren's History and revolutionary historiography, see
Lester Cohen's introduction to the History (n. 2) and his "Explaining
the Revolution: Ideology and Ethics in Mercy Otis Warren's Historical Theory," William
and Mary Quarterly 37 (1980): 200-218;The Revolutionary Historians:
Contemporary Narratives of the American Revolution (Ithaca, 1980); "Mercy
Otis Warren: The Politics of Language and the Aesthetics of Self," American
Quarterly 35 (1983):418-89; and "Creating a Usable Future: The
Revolutionary Historians," in The American Revolution: Its Character and Limits,
ed. Jack Greene (New York, 1987), 309-27. See also William Raymond Smith, History as
Argument: Three Patriot Historians of the American Revolution (The Hague, 1966); Lawrence
J. Friedman, Inventors of the Promised Land (New York, 1975); Lawrence J. Friedman and
Arthur H. Shaffer, "Mercy Otis Warren and the Politics of Historical
Nationalism," New England Quarterly 48 (1975): 194-215; Arthur H. Shaffer, The
Politics of History: Writing the History of the American Revolution (Chicago, 1975); and
Cheryl Z. Oreovicz, "Mercy Warren and 'Freedom's Genius,"' University of
Mississippi Studies in Egqlish 5 (1987): 215-30.

4 See Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in
Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, 1980); Mary Beth Norton, Liberty's Daughters:
The Revolutionary Experience of American Woman, 1750-1800 (Boston, 1980); and
Joan Hoff Wilson and Sharon L. Billinger, "Mercy Otis Warren: Playwright, Poet, and
Historian of the American Revolution," in Female Scholars: A Tradition of Learned
Women Before 1800, ed. J. R. Brink (Montreal, 1980), 161-82. These
readers concur that Warren was likely the most emancipated woman of her day. Friedman and
Shaffer, independently and together, are the critics who see a contrast between Warren's
behavior and her expressed view of women as sign of feminine game playing. Cohen, in
"Politics of Language," argues that Warren was simply unaware of her own best
gender interests. Emily Stipes Watts, in The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945
(Austin, 1977), is the only critic to hold that Warren applies republican concepts of
liberty to women.

5 It is important to separate the general concept of the "separate spheres"
from the particular instantiation of women's sphere described by Barbara Welter in 1966and named "the cult of true womanhood." This cult is an abstraction from
advice books published from the Jacksonian era onward; it cannot be taken as descriptive
of any nontextual reality nor retroactively applied even as a rhetorical construct to the
earlier period. At best, it is only one of many ways in which women were being
rhetorically constituted in the antebellum era within a separate sphere whose content was
fluid and contested. Linda K. Kerber, in "Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's
Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History," Journal of American History 75
(1988):9-39, shows that the spheres were never fixed and never fully real, but
always in flux and always as much prescriptive as descriptive. The dominant phrase for the
ideology of women's sphere in the revolutionary and immediate postrevolutionary periods is
probably "republican motherhood," not "true womanhood," but this
phrase, too, refers to a concept that is both rhetorical and unstable. See also n. 37.

7 The interpretation I advance here is analogous to, although historically
differentiated from, interpretations of contemporary new-right women by Andrea
Dworkin, Right-wing
Women (New York, 1983) and Rebecca E. Klatch, Women of the New Right
(Philadelphia, i987). Dworkin argues that male violence against women may produce a need
among them for a conservative ideology; Klatch claims that new-right women act on behalf
of what they perceive as their group interests as women. For these women, as for Warren,
the reality of male violence leads to a search for male protectors; the dominance of men
on the basis of superior physical strength is taken for granted and women's task is to
differentiate good men from bad ones. See also Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (New
York, 1987); and Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation, ed.
Helen M. Cooper, Adrienne Auslander Munich, and Susan Merrill Squier (Chapel Hill,
1989).

9 The linkage of politics to ethics in republican rhetoric has been influentially
studied by Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge,
Mass., 1967); Gordon A. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel
Hill, 1969);and J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political
Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975). For good
bibliographical surveys of the vast and proliferating literature on republican ideology,
see Linda K. Kerber, "The Republican Ideology of the Revolutionary Generation," American
Quarterly 37 (1985): 474-95; Joyce Appleby, "Republicanism in Old
and New Contexts," William and Mary Quarterly 43 (1986): 20-34; and Lance
Banning, "Jeffersonian Ideology Revisited: Liberal and Classical Ideas in the New
American Republic," William and Mary Quarterly 43 (1986): 5-19.

10 In "Creating a Usable Future," Cohen uses the word "staged" in
connection with the mode of "exemplary history" that he finds operating in all
the patriot histories. This mode, committed to Bolingbroke's proposition that
"history is philosophy teaching by examples," requires frequent intrusions by
the historian to emphasize the moral shape of events and bring out the moral message. See
also George H. Nadel, "Philosophy of History Before Historicism," History and
Theory 3 (1964): 291-315.

15 Kenneth Silverman calls attention to ubiquitous rape allusions in revolutionary
republican rhetoric and connects them to other images in a configuration that he names
"Whig Sentimentality" in A Cultural History of the American Revolution
(New York, 1976). Although he remarks that the image of Liberty is necessarily feminized
in these representations, he does not connect the image to "real" women.

16 David Ramsay, History of the American Revolution (New York, 1968), 1: 188-89.

17 Warren, History, 1: 102-3. Warren footnotes this passage with description and
praise of the duke of Northumberland's responses to American patriot demands.

18A Narrative of the Excursion and Ravages of the King's Troops under the Command
of General Gage, on the Nineteenth of April 1775; Together with the Depositions Taken by
Order of Congress, to Support the Truth of It (New York, 1968), 4, 21, 20.

19 The fullest study of the Battle of Lexington, by Frank Warren Coburn, The Battle
of April 19, 1775 (Lexington, 1922),turns up no other instance of abuse of
women.

23 My summary follows Christopher Ward, The War of the Revolution, ed. John
Richard Alden (New York, 1952), 2: 496. Ward continues to be consulted as a reliable
source by contemporary historians of the American Revolution.

37 This is not identical to the concept of republican motherhood described by Kerber
(see n. 4) because it does give women a role outside the home, through the circulation of
print rather than the person.

* Slightly revised from original publication in the South
Atlantic Quarterly, 90 (1991): 531-54.